


And I Will Write Her Name (And Cast It To The Sky)

by Memories_of_the_Shadows



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assassination Plot(s), Complete, F/F, Inspired by The Man In The Iron Mask, Masks, Orlesian Culture and Customs, Orlesian Grand Game (Dragon Age), Pre-Blight, Saphsep2020, Val Royeaux (Dragon Age), Wakes & Funerals, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, femmeslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:01:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26707924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Memories_of_the_Shadows/pseuds/Memories_of_the_Shadows
Summary: Celene disappears the night Briala's parents are murdered by Lady Mantillon's assassins, and Gaspard takes the throne.  But that woman in the strange velvet mask is hauntingly familiar...
Relationships: Briala/Celene Valmont
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24
Collections: Sapphic September Sprint-a-thon 2020





	And I Will Write Her Name (And Cast It To The Sky)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from “Dragonfly” by The Crüxshadows, which has been my favorite band since I heard them on the goth radio channel of aol. Yes, _dial-up_ era.
> 
> I do not consent to my work being hosted on any unofficial apps, especially any with ad revenue and subscription services, or any website other than ao3 unless I personally cross-posted a work.

There is a woman who lives in Val Royeaux whose mask shows no family affiliation, is never fashionable or anything but plain. If one did not see her closely, they might assume that she was a servant or commoner.

Except, her clothes and her mask--though plainer even than the ladies maids and house servants who one tends to see in the market--are made of fine material: black silk velvet so finely stitched and shaped that none of the pile is crushed and it is so closely shaped to her face in a manner that the more usual metal masks are unable to replicate that it appears as though she is scandalously not wearing a mask at all; and imported silks and satins that by all rights should be on a lady’s dress or a lord’s doublet rather than a dress so intentionally plain that even a Ferelden commoner would balk at wearing it.

Whenever this woman takes a turn in Val Royeaux’s market, under the city’s eight silks, she draws attention by her plain finery and her detail-less mask. She is a mystery of the Golden city, and many clamor to be _the one_ to discover her identity, and they whisper their theories to their friends and enemies. Surely people would ask but for the grim, mask-less guards who follow her every step.

The woman attends Lady Mantillon’s funeral, silent and flanked by guards.

Briala has heard of Val Royeaux’s woman in the cloth mask, but unlike the tittering Royans of the city of the sun, she also knows who it is.

After all, she washed that shining blonde hair for years. Grew up with the owner of that fine-boned face, knew exactly how she liked her tea and how deft she was at the Game.

And now, clearly, with Gaspard on the throne, Lady Mantillon dead at Briala’s hand, and Celene languishing in anonymous exile, something has changed.

She watches the back of Celene’s head as the Grand Cleric begins the rite, and remembers the last time she saw her.

Only sixteen, an orphan because of the man who beat her to the throne’s mother, and pushing Briala out of the mansion in which they both lived, albeit in very different circumstances.

“But, my parents…!” Briala had said, fighting against Celene’s hold because the other girl had just told her that assassins were coming to kill them all and that Briala needed to leave, flee, find the Dalish and _live_.

“I’ll send them after you, please, just _leave_!” Celene had said, pushing against Briala’s shoulders, her ice blue eyes wide with fear and no little guilt. The assassins wouldn’t have come to kill just servants, why would anyone even care about servants in the Game?

“What about you?” something had made Briala think past her fear and say and Celene had just looked deep in Briala’s eyes, put a thin hand on Briala’s face, and kissed her.

“I’ll be fine,” she had said and Briala had finally gone.

Briala had never made it to the Dalish, her parents never made it out of that house, but she had also never heard of Celene ever again.

For a time, Briala had mourned Celene as well as her parents, searched for her killer with the same fervor. All signs had pointed to Lady Mantillon and Briala had let her anger and grief lead her.

Lady Mantillon was dead, but Briala only survived killing the Dowager through Felassan’s assistance. Up to this point, she had wondered if she was even worth saving. What would she do now? She is just an elf, not even one with any particular ability to make the changes she wants to see in the world and no patron to help her either.

Half of Orlais seems to be attending this funeral, and though Briala is as adept as ever at going as unnoticed as any other servant, no one is allowed close to Celene, not to serve her, and not to speak.

It’s a cruel kind of prison, Briala thinks, letting Celene see everything that she surely misses and yet keeping her apart.

Trailing Celene and her guards as they leave is not nearly as difficult as the rumors would have had Briala believe. If she believed every gossip in Val Royeaux, the woman in the cloth mask was more akin to a ghost than a person, and no bard ever comes back from trying to ascertain her whereabouts alive.

Briala is sure that has more to do with Gaspard’s coffers than the ability of Celene’s guards.

She charms the guard on duty at the servant’s door with a flirty, but shy smile, and relieves the single maid with a story that Briala gets the poor, overworked woman to mostly tell to herself, only being required to know the proper places to agree. The cook is a bit harder to placate, but eventually she pushes a tray into Briala’s hands and threatens her with a whipping should the lady of the house be at all displeased.

While it has been a few years and Celene no doubt thinks of Briala as one of the Dalish by now if she thinks of her at all, Briala hopes that Celene won’t be too upset to find differently.

The room that Celene is in is as plain as her clothes, and Briala wonders exactly how much gold Gaspard put into creating this cage for his cousin. He must have done a full remodel of this apartment, because even the mouldings are simplified. Celene has her back to the door, staring out the window to where Briala can see the glitter of the Miroir de la Mère.

“Leave the tray on the table,” Celene orders without turning, clearly wishing to be alone despite having been so isolated for what Briala can only assume has been years. Three years, she thinks, because it took Gaspard a full year in court--all the servants whisper that he had to threaten the council members multiple times and even then his crowning was contentious--to be named emperor.

Briala puts the tray on the table but she doesn’t leave.

Instead, she goes through the familiar motions of making Celene’s tea, four years gone and Briala remembers it just as sharply as if it was yesterday.

Celene turns, her pretty mouth pressed into an angry line, clearly ready to demand and order the way she used to when she was in a mood, but she sees Briala and falters.

The tea is cloudy with enough honey to fell a hive, and Celene accepts it stiffly when Briala hands it to her with a smile, not even looking at it.

“You’re supposed to be with the Dalish,” Celene says, reaching a shaking free hand out to Briala as if to touch her, make sure she’s real, but Celene pulls back before she does, sips her tea instead. “You’re supposed to be _safe_.”

“I thought you were dead. I knew my parents were. It seems that it would be less cruel of Gaspard if you were,” Briala says. Celene had always loved fine things, loved playing the Game, loved art, wit, and learning. Here, in this plain room with no books or people, Celene would be like a flower with no sun or water.

“He would prefer that as well, but Florianne has made herself distinctly unsuitable to be Empress and his new wife’s womb can’t seem to catch his heirs. Gaspard is too much a patriot and too much a soldier not to have an inheritance plan for his inevitable death.” Celene brings the cup to her lips again but sets it back on the saucer without taking another sip. “This was not his idea though. He would prefer to keep me close and in his debt. Even now he does come here to gloat and to demand advice. Lady Mantillon thought this situation… more suitable, however.”

Briala hadn’t been regretting her assassination before but fierce joy at doing away with that wretched old woman swoops again in her stomach. “She used to favor you greatly,” Briala says, hopefully without giving away her own role in the day’s funeral.

Celene sighs. “And thus I disappointed her even _more_ greatly when I found that there was one thing I could not do for my ambitions.”

Her heart stops in her chest.

Even without the careful pose that tries to signal nonchalance--too careful, too distant when before Celene had been all too willing to watch Briala, to lean just that fraction forward--Briala knows that Celene is referring to _her_ , to her parents, to the mansion full of dead servants and no Celene to be found.

“You… knew?” It comes out soft, without any of the heartbreak that Briala feels.

“They wouldn’t leave!” Celene cries, her tea set aside so that it won’t spill, and her blue eyes wide and sad behind the black velvet of her mask. “I told them, I ordered them all to leave, but even when I told them that assassins were coming none of them would _go_. I thought I had more time, I thought that I had _bought_ more time by telling Lady Mantillon I would take care of it, but she must have known. Her harlequins had followed me. And I fought, but it wasn’t enough. She was… very disappointed. ‘What are a few servants’ lives to the lives you could change as Empress,’ she had asked me. But I grew up with them. I had already lost my mother, my father, and you. I didn’t want to lose anyone else.”

Briala has seen Celene fake temper tantrums before, has even seen her cry to get her way--a pretty tear squeezed out to run under her mask and down her cheek--but she only ever saw Celene truly upset a few times.

Ruddy blotches appear on Celene’s pale skin, and tears spill out in an uncontrolled flood, soaking the velvet of her mask and making spots that will be impossible to fully clean.

“I killed her,” Briala confesses, shocked at the scene and herself. “I killed her for my parents and for you, and she tried to kill me for it; but I survived and she’ll never harm anyone ever again.”

Celene sobs. Briala is four years out of practice with her, but the way that Briala would have reacted then was as a servant to a mistress. Here, in this plain, gloomy prison, Briala thinks they’re more equals than they ever have been before and it makes something in her settle.

She removes both of their masks and wraps her arms around Celene. Celene stiffens then relaxes into Briala’s arms, clinging to Briala tightly until her tears run out and even then she doesn’t move away.

“Gaspard intends to march on Ferelden,” Celene whispers hoarsely into Briala’s shoulder, “he intends to take back what Meghren and Florian lost with blood and war. He thinks that the dog lords will just give up their lands once more, that they won’t fight to the last man and woman. He’ll get our armies slaughtered for the sake of someone else’s loss of pride.”

Briala thinks about her parents, the alienage that Val Royeaux squeezes over ten thousand elves into, and the alienages like it all over Thedas. It won’t just be human soldiers who would fight and die in that war, but elves too. The servants told stories around the kitchen fire of the elves that stole out of the night to take Orlesian lives in the rebellion, not even Dalish but proper city elves. How Maric won back his kingdom with raids and cunning rather than pitched battles no matter how the Butcher of River Dane got his fame. No doubt the Fereldens would go back to tactics they _know_ work, and so many people would die. So many elves would die.

Stories would spread even further than they already had and nobles all over would kill any elf that wouldn’t be loyal, which would be nearly all of them. Poverty and hardship breeds resentment even without the additional crimes that elves face.

“Do you still want to be Empress?” Briala asks, because Celene is not perfect, but once she is told how she can make things better for herself by helping others she does at least _try_.

Celene knows the value of love and loyalty beyond even the concerns of the Game or a chevalier’s code. Perhaps, in a different life, things would be different, but Celene loved her servants enough in this one to put them above her own ambitions.

And it’s Briala’s loyalty now that will put Celene on the throne. If she wants it.

Love and loyalty bought and paid for with love and loyalty displayed in turn.

The answer is long in coming, but it begins with a shrewd look and a hesitant kiss.

They break apart and Briala wants to chase back into another one but Celene--her face splotchy from crying, and her dress creased from clinging too hard to another person--straightens and somehow looks more regal than the golden lions that symbolize the throne in her drab, unornamented dress and bare face. “…Yes,” she says at last, fierce and full of awe.

Briala kisses Celene again, pouring all her feelings into it.

With Celene on the throne, and Briala at her side--whether in the shadows or the light doesn’t matter--surely nothing can stop them from changing the world. Without Lady Mantillon to whisper poison in his ear, Gaspard will surely revert back to his own instincts, allowing Celene to play her part in the Game, and Briala will watch and wait for the perfect opportunity.

It will take time, but Briala will make sure they have it.

And Celene will sit on the Lion’s throne because of Briala, with all the gratitude and willingness to hear her council that will surely entail, beyond even that of a lover.

**Author's Note:**

> So I finally read "The Masked Empire" about a week ago because I was replaying DAI and was at Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts.
> 
> I _loved_ it. Omg, it explains so much about Celene and Briala's past relationship and why Orlais is the way it is in 9:41, not to mention all the little call backs to DAO and Ferelden, omg I was hooked. And the Celene/Briala was so _tender_ but then you found out what Celene _did_ and it was just heartbreaking. Briala is a total badass though, and I'm just enough of a sap to want them to reconcile. I could gush about them for ages, but I won't XD.
> 
> This was written for Sapphic September 2020, which is usually part of [Uzushi0]() but this year Tim opened it up to other fandoms rather than just Naruto so of course I jumped on the chance to do Dragon Age.


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